The Internet has been acknowledged as a recent technological revolution, due to its significant impact on society as a whole. Nevertheless, precisely due to its impact, limitations of the current Internet are becoming apparent; in particular, its inability to automatically take into account the meaning of online documents. Some proposals for taking meaning into account began to appear, mainly the so-called Semantic Web, which includes a set of technologies like RDF that are based on new markup languages. Though these technologies could be technically sound, practical limitations, such as the high training level required to construct Semantic Web pages, and the small proportion of current Semantic Web pages make the Sematic Web marginal today and also in the near foreseeable future. Quantitative Semantics and Soft Computing Methods for the Web: Perspectives and Applications will provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings related to quantitative, soft-computing and approximate methods for dealing with Internet semantics. The target audience of this book is composed of professionals and researchers working in the fields of information and knowledge related technologies (e.g. Information sciences and technology, computer science, Web science, and artificial intelligence).
Ramon F. Brena is full professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, since 1990, where he is head of a research group in Distributed Knowledge and Multiagent Systems. Dr Brena is the head of the Master level graduate programs in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Brena holds a PhD from the INPG, Grenoble, France, where he presented a doctoral Thesis related to Knowledge in Program Synthesis. His current research and publication areas include Intelligent Agents and Multiagent Systems, Ubiquitous computing and Ambient Intelligence, Formal Methods in Software Engineering, Knowledge representation and reasoning, Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence in general. He has been visiting professor at the U. of Texas at Dallas and the Université de Montréal. Dr Brena is member of the ACM and is recognized as an established researcher by the official Mexican research agency, CONACyT (SNI level I).
Adolfo Guzmán-Arenas is a Computer Science professor at Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, of which he was Founding Director. He holds a B. Sc. in Electronics from ESIME-IPN and a Ph. D. from MIT. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Life Fellow Member, member of MIT Educational Council, member of the Academia de Ingeniería and the Academia Nacional de Ciencias (Mexico). From the President of Mexico, he has received (1996) the National Prize in Science and Technology and (2006) the Premio Nacional a la Excelencia "Jaime Torres Bodet." He works in semantic information processing and AI techniques, often mixed with distributed information systems.
